Another step back.
Er. Hi. It’s a little late, isn’t it? I didn’t run away; I just got caught up in work and writing this morning. Mainly writing. Hush. I’ll behave myself again after NaNoWriMo’s over.
There doesn’t seem to be much explosively new going on on the news front this morning, anyway. People are b*tching about ENDA, churches are still screeching about allowing GBLTQ parishioners to have certain freedoms or even say anything, and election BS is keying up to levels so high I’m starting to wonder where I left my thigh-high boots.
In other words, to quote Stephen King yet again: SSDD. Same sh*t, different day. Sometimes I wonder if anything’s really ever going to change, or if we’ll be fighting the same battles and having the same petty arguments all our lives.
In browsing the ‘net, though, I ran across something that rather baffled me: an article discussing statistics on a failed HIV vaccine. The article notes that out of test groups of people given the vaccine (synthetic HIV genes tucked into the good ol’ common cold, intended to stimulate the body to fight off HIV as it fights off the cold) vs. people given a dummy vaccine, a higher percentage of those given the vaccine actually went on to contract HIV.
It doesn’t say why.
It says they were more likely to contract HIV through sex or other risky behavior, but the details are still woefully skimpy despite a multi-paragraph article. Did these people engage in more risky behavior because they thought the vaccine would protect them? Did they deliberately ignore the fact that sex partners or others they shared bodily fluids with were HIV positive, because of the vaccine? Or did they go about their normal behavior, and likely would have ended up infected with HIV anyway with the vaccine only slightly increasing their risk?
The article is just entirely puzzling and vague, and it raises another question that wasn’t addressed: could they have been infected with HIV from the synthetic genes alone, rather than just lowering their resistance to it so they were more likely to be infected with the virus when exposed to it “in the wild”?
This sort of testing makes me extremely nervous, honestly. I’m all for developing preventative measures to help defend against HIV/AIDs, but this is a deadly disease with no cure and limited treatment options. You’d think they’d be a bit more certain of what they were doing to their test groups before they forged on ahead.
Something about this just doesn’t sit right with me.
And that’s all I have to say for the day. See you Monday with another page of No Style (with actual drawings this time).
HIV/AIDS, hiv vaccine, failed hiv vaccine
November 10th, 2007 at 4:54 am
[...] Sanders wrote an interesting post today on Another step back.Here’s a quick [...]
November 11th, 2007 at 3:26 am
Of course there’s no proof for this particular vaccine, but generally these things are tested extensively in animals before the drug ever sees human trial. They would have had to be absolutely certain the vaccine was not dangerous before giving it to humans. Supposedly.
Also, these sorts of studies are usually blind so that the volunteers don’t know whether they’ve been given the vaccine or the placebo. In other words, people given the vaccine wouldn’t take more risks than the others because they don’t know which group they’re in.
The article didn’t say why, most likely because the scientists have no idea what the reason is. That’s just how science works sometimes. *shrug*